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Specter Watch (YO-KAI Watch Franchise)
is a series of role-playing games developed and published by Level-5. Each game has its own unique story, Yo-kai, quests, and characters. The franchise has released games and merchandise worldwide as well the animated series based on the franchise. History The success of their three major IPs, Professor Layton, Inazuma Eleven, and Danball Senki let Level-5 to create a new IP that is meant to stay for a very long time. They took a popular anime and manga series Doraemon as their influence and decided to create the IP Yo-kai Watch. Their first step into the development was to make the player explore freely and walking around in an open-world environment. Before the franchise was released as a video game, the series was first released as a manga on December 15, 2012. Afterwards, Level-5 released a game trailer that was released on the E3 in 2011, which first shown the game running on the . The Playstation 3 version showed a much larger world, but Level-5 changed the platform from Playstation 3 to Nintendo 3DS. Popularity in Japan Their first video game released in Japan and became a major success. It debuted with 53,000 sold copies in its first week and sold in total 1.29 million in 2014, which became one of the best-selling games on the Nintendo 3DS. The sequels of the game became extremely popular and the demands in other countries than Japan were extremely high. The animation series that is based on the game became one of the most-watched animated series in Japan, mostly ending in the top ten of the rates alongside with other popular animation series such as: Detective Conan, One Piece, Pokémon and Doraemon. The franchise gained as well numerous of cross-overs in Japan with popular characters from popular series or franchises. The popularity in Japan leads Yo-kai Watch to become a phenomenal creation, as it became quickly a multi-billion franchise. The franchise sold exact 10,438,903 copies in Japan alone, which excludes digital sales.Yo-Kai Watch Sells More Than 10 Million Copies in Japan Release in the west The western audience were interested in the game, which plannings were revealed to release the first game worldwide. However, the game was released seperately in the west. In 2015, the first game was released in North America, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand. In 2016, Europe received the first game during the Spring. The animation of the series aired as well in west, with only one season and as well a second season. The anime is revealed to be very popular in the west. The game has proven, not to be so popular in the west other than Japan,Europe and in Australia. The first Yo-kai Watch game sold in North America very low, with 360,000 copies since 2017. This led Level-5 to change their plans for North America to make the franchise popular, brining events in North America ahead of Japan. The first Yo-kai Watch game, sold much better in Europe than North America and even Japan with ony 650,000 copies. The game are very popular in France and Spain, which the game even received high demands from the customers. The situation in Europe has led that Yo-kai Watch 2, will be debuting in Russia, which also the European marketing of the franchise has different plans than the North American markets and promoting the franchise in different countries.